is the fruit of development in the art of instrumentation which is the
newest department in music. Vocal music had reached its highest point
before instrumental music made a beginning as an art. The former was
the pampered child of the Church, the latter was long an outlaw. As
late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries instrumentalists were
vagabonds in law, like strolling players. They had none of the rights
of citizenship; the religious sacraments were denied them; their
children were not permitted to inherit property or learn an honourable
trade; and after death the property for which they had toiled
escheated to the crown. After the instruments had achieved the
privilege of artistic utterance, they were for a long time mere
slavish imitators of the human voice. Bach treated them with an
insight into their possibilities which was far in advance of his time,
for which reason he is the most modern composer of the first half of
the eighteenth century; but even in Handel's case the rule was to
treat them chiefly as supports for the voices. He multiplied them just
as he did the voices in his choruses, consorting a choir of oboes and
bassoons, and another of trumpets of almost equal numbers with his
violins.

[Sidenote: _The modern band._]

The so-called purists in England talk a great deal about restoring
Handel's orchestra in performances of his oratorios, utterly unmindful
of the fact that to our ears, accustomed to the myriad-hued orchestra
of to-day, the effect would seem opaque, heavy, unbalanced, and
without charm were a band of oboes to play in unison with the violins,
another of bassoons to double the 'cellos, and half a dozen trumpets
to come flaring and crashing into the musical mass at intervals. Gluck
in the opera, and Haydn and Mozart in the symphony, first disclosed